I recently took a month to tour Texas. I saw hundreds of wind generators out on the west Texas plains.
Having seen others in Wyoming and noting many were not operational, I purposely made a count. It is not too hard, even when driving at 70 mph.
It is very safe to say that 10 to 15% are inoperative. Given an array of 30 or so, 4 or 5 will be still. I made several counts over a three day period and the results were always there. Lots of the wind generators just don’t work.
Boone Pickens was on Cavuto recently. He was touting his bill being proposed to convert 18 wheelers to natural gas from diesel. he has abandoned his lofty wind power scheme.
Wind energy is a costly fraudulent joke
Same thing in Northern Indiana.
I drive by a wind farm with over a hundred of the things just sitting there, taking up space.
Wind is still part of TB Pickens plan. He wants wind to help replace Natural Gas Electrical Power generation. This gives more Natural Gas freed up to compete with transportation fuel. Nat Gas from shale formations are now taking some pressure off this but we remain a Nat Gas importer.
Right now TBP’s competes with coal at a low $/BTU. I believe he wants a bigger piece of transportation market and move his Nat Gas more into that higher $/BTU market. But if we are just trading imported oil for imported LNG, the profit is not as high as producing domestic Nat Gas and only using pipelines.
Technology advances have made the Nat Gas from shale economic and greatly improved our reserves. But the daily production level still remains below our current consumption. Adding significant addition demand as transportation fuel will jack the price of Nat Gas and bring in too many foreign suppliers of LNG. Pickens doesn’t want that much completion before he develops his fueling infrastructure and captures a big market share.
My opinion, nothing more.
Pickens owns the mineral and water rights to vast areas of West Texas. He made a deal with the city of Dallas to supply it with water, 500,000 gals a day I think, but they had to build the pipeline from the water to Dallas. I think they agreed.
He abandoned his wind farm recently because no one would build the transmission lines for him.
He has been pushing natural gas for a long time because he has plenty of it. He has pushed municipalities to power their city and state vehicles on natural gas. He has pushed the public transit people to do the same.
Pickens is a shrewd business man. He saw the value of buying up all those mineral and water rights of the vast West Texas plains and now he is pushing to create markets for his products.
The oil and gas are already there and just need to be pumped and transported. So is the water. So is the wind. His raw materials are free, in a way, and he just needs to pay to collect and transport them.
I do not find fault with that. It is free enterprise. There is a need for all he does.
Not for Boone Pickens as long as he can get the gov't (us, poor serf taxpayers) to foot the bill so he can reap the profits. "He has abandoned his lofty wind power scheme" only because of his failure to get Congress to dump the costs of it on the taxpayer.
Only when the wind is not blowing but that doesn't change the fact that a 1.5 mw turbine produces 4-6000 mwh/year.